You can tell that I’m beating around the bush, so I’ll just say it. I killed a man today. I have had to do some terrible things on those search-and-destroy missions, Loretta. Things I’ll never get over. But today, I saw his eyes.
We were on a march up Highway 1. And I stepped aside just for a second to pee, although we’re not supposed to do this, and just as I unzipped, there he was. Looking right at me and I could see in the way he clenched his jaw that he was about to pull his trigger and so I pulled mine first and he fell not five feet from me. Like his knees had been shot out from under him, but the round hit him square in the chest and he was dead just like that. He was about my age, probably a couple years younger, but I bet he had a wife and family and a mother and sister, too. We’re not supposed to think about that, but who can help it? I keep seeing his eyes. They were so tired. And so then I say your name so you’ll come up and overtake his face.
So everything is changed for me, see. I won’t go on about it, but I had to put it on paper. A confession, I guess. Don’t ever speak of it again, all right? Let this be the time I tell you and let it go.
This is a war, though. And until you’re over here you can’t know what that’s like. Nobody can. We keep hearing on the news about the people marching against the war and all that and even though some of them say they’re marching for us I just don’t get it. I don’t know about all this either, all this war. But I do know that I’m a soldier and I was asked to come here and fight for reasons that my country said were right and so that’s my job now. That’s what we’re here to do and I’m here now so I’m going to do it and just pray your name until it’s over. I don’t have much light left, so I’ll close, although I could go on just writing and writing until it was nothing more than nonsense. If I could do that maybe it would all start to make sense. But I don’t think so.
Burn this, Loretta. Loretta Loretta Loretta.
All my love,
Stanton
Less than halfway through the letter I had stopped reading aloud, but Edie was sitting close to me by then — we had both sat upright with our legs crossed, leaning over the letter on the floor in front of us — and she read a paragraph but then couldn’t go on so we both read it silently, together. When we had read the last word, his name, we both sat there for a time without saying anything. The first thing I felt was sorry for him. I felt awful for him, to know that he carried that around with him every day of his life. That and more. Then I felt wrong and stupid. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel and why I felt the way I did. And then I was mad because he had never told me this, although I don’t know what would possess a man to tell such a thing to his ten-year-old son.
Finally, Edie broke the silence.
“Oh, God, Eli,” she said, and bolted away from me, realizing that we had gotten so close that our shoulders and the soles of our shoes were touching. “We shouldn’t have done this. We shouldn’t have read these letters.”
I didn’t say anything. I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, then returned it to its proper place in the stack, planted it back in the sweet-smelling box, dropped all the other things atop it, and eased the box closed, as if lowering the lid on a living thing that is to be hidden away. I held the box with the flats of my palms on either side and sat it back down, caught a glimpse of myself and Edie in the dresser mirror, and left the room without a word.
I went to my beech tree on the ridge overlooking our house. Nobody knew I had this secret place of my own, not even Edie. I don’t know why I didn’t want to tell her that I had a tree, too, just like she had her willow. When she showed me that morning how to listen to the willow, I had already known. I had done the same thing many times with this tree.
I had read all about beech trees in one of the botany books my mother had kept from teacher’s college. Their bark is not like bark at all, but skin. It doesn’t ever get cracked and rough because the outside grows when the tree grows. So the trunks of beech trees sometimes feel alive, like an elephant’s wide, gray legs. I appreciated beeches in particular because their leaves don’t fall off in the autumn but cling to the branches until new, bright green leaves come back in the spring. All through the winter the brown, shriveled autumn leaves hang there, staying with the tree. The beech is never alone. This, too, made me feel as if the beeches were more alive than other trees, the way they long to have company, just like people.
When I had left our house, I had grabbed my composition book and walked in a determined, fast stride across the backyard, right through the garden. Edie had run down the steps of the screen porch, calling my name, but when I didn’t turn to her, she had let the door slam behind her and sat down on the steps, watching as I walked away. I had known that she wouldn’t follow me if I didn’t invite her. And she had known that I needed time alone. From up there I could peer through the leaves and see our back porch, and I saw that she had finally tired of waiting for me to come back and had gone home. I hated to leave her like that, but I knew she’d understand. That was the best and most unexplainable thing about our friendship. Sometimes it was like we could read each other’s minds. We never spoke about this, but both of us knew that we were constantly sending each other messages.
I knelt at the base of the tree and put both my hands against it. Its skin was cool, just as it always was, no matter how hot the weather. If I stayed very still, I could feel juices flowing within. I ran my hands down the trunk, the way the doctor had the time everyone thought I had broken my leg jumping off the toolshed roof. With my hands on the tree, I could feel what seemed like tendons, slight rises where the trunk felt as if it was flexing long, broad muscles. After a while I leaned my head against the beech and let its coolness sink into my forehead. When I did this, I didn’t have to think about anything at all. I just let the calm that the tree always possessed spread through me, and for a brief time I had no thoughts of my father killing a man, or of a war I didn’t understand, or anything else. I thought only of the tree and the cool peace against my own skin.
After a time I turned and sat down, my back resting against the beech, my knees drawn up to my chest. I sat as still as I could and looked around me. Sitting down this way, I couldn’t see any of the houses below me or anything except for a forest of leaves. Above me there was only birdcall. Redbirds that perched on a dogwood limb and peered down at me before fluttering away. A swallow that sang high in the branches of the beech. The forest was filled with birdsong and the cry of lone cicadas, mourning the oncoming heat of another June day. The world smelled different here. Clean and musky, like damp sand. I closed my eyes and saw my father bringing his gun up, saw the color drain from his face after the shot was fired. Heard the silence filling the jungle after the blast. I imagined colorful birds flapping away with much noise. I saw it all in my mind — every detail enlarged, exaggerated — so I opened my eyes and flipped through the pages of my composition book until I found the clean page where I had left my ink pen. I put the tip of the pen to the paper, but nothing came to me. There were no words.
I concentrated on everything around me.
Lifting a small sandstone rock near me, I found a colony of beetles, going about their daily routines. Scurrying away from the sunlight, disappearing into holes that looked far too small for their sudden escape. Some of them lazed about, though, content with some bit of food too tiny for me to see. And then I could run my hand over a clump of moss — so green it didn’t seem real, as if all the green of the woods had soaked into it — and I knew that beneath my palm a whole world existed, a world made up of insects for which I knew no names. All these little live things. How many of them had I killed with my innocent footsteps to this place? I had most likely disrupted thousands of lives, obliterated things I wasn’t even aware of. This pained me to think on.
Above me there were all the birds calling to one another. But beyond them there were hundreds of birds who sat silently, watching, waiting. And most likely dozens of snakes and lizards and other animals who were aw
are of me without my having any knowledge of them. I imagined that farther up the ridge, where the outcropping of gray rock stood like a row of clumped, crooked gravestones, a fox was watching me. I was so sure that I was being observed that I closed my eyes, picturing him. I thought he was a child-fox, and I could see each of his fine whiskers on either side of his nose, his brown eyes that had a spot of yellow in each one. His orange coat was clean and shiny. The white that smudged around his face lay like a soft shield on his chest. I imagined that he was considering me, wondering why I looked so sad.
The little fox may or may not have been there. I like to think that he was, and that after a long while he slinked away, wishing that we lived in the kind of world where he could comfort me.
Through the treetops I could see a whitening sky, a sky bleached by a boiling noonday sun. But here, within the leaves, the earth breathed up a thin chill. I could not cry for what had happened to my father, for what my father had done, so instead I curled up at the base of the tree, lay my head against one of the larger roots, and tried to not think about it. Sometimes just being still is the best thing you can do for yourself.
By late June the world was awfully hot, and everything suffered. The heat hung like a mist over the mountains. The leaves baked and drooped on the trees. The river shrank in places, revealing nakedness in the shoals, where only two thin streams of water trickled through. The swimming hole downstream remained full, but the water was still and stagnant-looking, moving only at the banks when someone jumped in from one of the cliffs.
Hardly anyone had an air conditioner, and those who did found it had very little effect on any part of the house except the room it was in. Whole families spent the hot part of the day gathered in whichever room this happened to be. Others threw open their windows and propped box fans in their open doorways to deal with the heat.
My family had no intention of being cooped up in the living room throughout most of the day — we were way too restless for that — so we simply accepted it.
Nell and Josie spent much of their time on lawn chairs in the shoals, parking themselves in the middle of the water and occasionally putting their hands down to cup water over themselves. Nell was very white and freckled. She wore a black bathing suit with a little skirt around the waist, but Josie, who was dark as a Cherokee, had on her two-piece that Daddy had about died over her buying at the Fashion Bug, even though Mom had relented and approved. The suit was pink with ties on each hip, which gave the illusion that one tug of the strings could make the bottoms fall away.
Nell and Josie wore matching white sunglasses (Nell had bought them at the Rexall) and slathered themselves in baby oil they had spiked with iodine. Everybody did it that way then. They lay back with their arms very straight at their sides. Josie had brought along a small radio that she tied to the back of her lounger with a shoelace. The music was distorted by the time it reached the hiding place Edie and I had made ourselves in the cool woods overlooking the river, so that it turned into a game of “Name That Tune” for us. There was a stream of rock ’n’ roll: Queen, Steve Miller, ELO, the Eagles. Nell and Josie’s voices were lost beneath the blur of music.
My mother arose early and was sometimes joined by Stella, who helped her hoe the garden. Mom paid special attention to her cantaloupes while Stella tended the tomatoes. They worked in silence for long stretches, but would sometimes talk in low tones for a while, too, pausing only to lean on their hoes when either the conversation or the knots of pain in the smalls of their backs grew especially serious.
Every two or three days, a thunderstorm would save us all. The storms gave plenty of warning. First there was a breeze. Then gusts of wind came twitching down the valley, setting the leaves to rock, turning their white sides out. We all stood outside in the wind, breathing in the air before the oncoming rain. We became so caught up in the smell of the approaching downpour — the best, cleanest scent — that often we didn’t have time to get inside before the rain simply dropped out of the sky in a sudden pounding. The rain always fell straight down, so hard that it made perfectly round dents in the dust. By the time I had run for cover beneath the screen porch, the rain was falling on the tin roof with a sound like a great drone of Bible insects descending on us. Other times the drops sounded like quarters hitting the roof, and I imagined an old man with a wild mane of white hair leaning out of an airplane to shower the world with change.
One day, just as I was racing up the steps to the porch, Mom and Nell rushed past me the other way, laughing, like I was invisible. They were both barefoot, and their freckled feet looked elegant and white against the muddied yard. As a boom of thunder shook the ground, they stood there and spread their arms out at the same time, as if they had practiced these movements earlier. They twirled and danced, laughing like crazy women, their faces leaning back to catch the rain in their eyes. They looked like young girls to me, their hair soaking wet, their skin smoothed and shined by the water.
“Oh, God,” my mother said, two little words of praise. I could barely hear her over the pounding on the tin roof.
Nell twirled around, her arms raised.
I stood near the screen, watching them, the warm mist of rain breathing against my face. Occasionally they touched hands, leaning back so the rain could hit their faces, holding their palms up to catch the drops. I was mesmerized.
The rain never lasted more than ten minutes at the most. This day it lasted even less, and when it was finished, the drops seemed to be sucked right back up into the sky, leaving the world to bake and steam.
Nell shook her head, and drops of water glistened out from her. She stepped up onto the porch, letting the screen door slam behind her. “Lord, that felt good,” she said. She wiped a hand over her face and smiled down at me as if she’d known I was there the whole time. “I’ve never understood why people run to get out of the rain in the summertime,” she said, running her hand through her hair. “People will drive miles and miles to go jump in a cool swimming hole, but when it rains, they scatter.” She sloshed on by me, into the house.
Out on the yard, my mother had gone completely still, her back to me. She was facing the woods, where the sounds of rain continued — a deep, hollow music — as the trees dripped. What memory or thought was she caught up in? What secret played out on her face if I could have seen it? Somehow I knew there was regret in her eyes as she faced the dripping woods and listened to the recovering trees. Her shoulders were square with sadness. I thought of calling to her, or even walking out there and taking hold of her hand, but I didn’t. I was afraid she wouldn’t notice me.
Instead, I kept my place on the porch. Now the garden soil was dark brown and the leaves of Edie’s willow seemed brighter, more alive. But already the puddles had been soaked up and the sun had come out again, brighter than before. I closed my eyes for a time and listened to the woods, the melody being pecked out by water dripping onto leaves.
With my eyes closed, I pictured the man Daddy had killed. I had been having this problem ever since reading that letter, often taking an hour or more to go to sleep at night. I had made up his face in my mind. I saw his fingers uncurl from his rifle, heard the dull thump of his body hitting the ground. Saw my father’s face go pale, the cold beads of sweat popping out on his forehead.
I opened my eyes because I didn’t want to think about it anymore.
By the time Daddy came home from work, the ground was so parched again that he found me, Nell, and Josie sitting on the grass in the backyard. He leaned down and kissed Josie’s cheek, and she didn’t even acknowledge him. This was troubling to me; a year ago she would have gotten up to hug him. Once she had always been with him, and now she stood completely apart, avoiding him at all costs. I wondered how this made my father feel, how he could be silent about that. Then again, he was usually silent about everything, which is most likely why he stayed on the edge of explosion all the time. When he did say anything at length, it was sometimes in a rant that came out of nowhere. Daddy ran his hand
over my head and stomped on into the house for his shower. Nell paused from her talking long enough to look after him. He hadn’t even spoken to her.
Nell was giving us a music lesson.
“If you want to know good music, then all you have to do is listen to the Carter Family, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Nina Simone,” she said, turning back to us. She took four albums out of a milk crate. The green record player sat near her bare feet. “That’s all it takes to have good taste.”
She laid the albums out on the grass, like big square playing cards. I looked at the Carter Family album and noted the women’s heavy wool coats, the man’s stiff suit, their steely gazes into the camera.
“They look madder than fire,” I said.
“People didn’t smile for cameras back then,” Nell said. “They didn’t have much to smile about. But they’re the best. They’re real.”
“Plus it took so much longer to take a picture,” Josie said.
Nell tapped the album cover showing a beautiful black woman in a red dress. “Nina,” she said, as if this were someone she knew and missed very much. She held the album by the cover and let the record slide out. “You have to hear this.”
She put the needle on the correct groove and sat back with her hands behind her, her eyes closed as the song started. She mouthed the words as the woman sang, “Ne me quitte pas.”